When Andreea Sistrunk started taking classes at Virginia Tech in the fall of 2014 she had left her job as a full time teacher in northern Virginia to devote more time to her two young daughters, ages three and seven. “It was becoming more difficult for me to hold a full time job and be […]
Lei Zhang was a master’s degree student in software engineering at Jinan University in China when his advisor told him about meeting Chang-Tien Lu from Virginia Tech and how he was doing research with algorithms on Twitter. While they were using different platforms — Zhang’s own work was on Weibo, the largest Chinese microblogging website […]
Moeti Masiane’s initial interest in analyzing data grew even stronger when earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of the District of Columbia and then a master’s degree from Norfolk State University. As he began to consider going on to a Ph.D. program in the same field, he was drawn to Virginia […]
Ming Zhu learned about machine reading comprehension — making computers understand sophisticated natural language and be able to answer questions about what was read — while taking a graduate course at Carnegie Mellon University. “After building a state-of-the-art Neural Question Answering (QA) model from scratch based on a research paper, my confidence grew in believing […]
John Wenskovitch’s research interest is centered around the idea of creating interactive visualization systems that learn from user interactions. This often takes the form of conducting exploratory data analysis on high-dimensional, numerical datasets and using a common visualization technique, 2D scatterplot, to project the data. When asked if he could explain his work to someone […]
Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a global health problem affecting over 10 million people worldwide and is a leading cause of death and disability among children and young adults in the United States. While the understanding of biological mechanisms related to acquired brain injuries has improved significantly in the past two decades, none of these […]
Jonathan Baker and Sirui Yao, Ph.D. students at the Discovery Analytics Center, and Leanna Ireland, a National Science Foundation research trainee in the Urban Computing (UrbComp) Certificate program administered through DAC, have each been awarded a Deloitte Foundation Data Analytics Fellowship in the amount of $10,000 to fund their research. Baker, also a National Science […]
A collaborative project with the Washington Post to predict the popularity of news articles kept Yaser Keneshloo busy after joining the Discovery Analytics Center in the spring semester of 2014. “The Washington Post now uses this research as an internal tool for predicting the click-rate of a news article within 24 hours of publication,” said […]
Davon Woodard has spent the past few months in the National Capital Region as a fellow for Data Science for the Public Good (DSPG). The program, launched and directed by the Social and Decision Analytics Laboratory (SDAL) at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech, engages young scholars in conducting research at the intersection of statistics, […]
Virginia Tech graduates celebrating their achievements this fall included seven Ph.D. students at the Discovery Analytics Center.